by Brad Barkley
“I know, I know. Just adjunct is all I’m looking for.”
“Spring schedule is set. I could give you a couple sections, but not until next fall.”
“That’s perfect. But you sound pissed.”
“Not pissed, Al. Just wary.”
“I’m not going to bail on you, I promise.”
“You’ll probably have to reapply. I can send the papers. Still at the same place?”
“I’m home,” she said.
“Home in Cumberland?”
“Home,” she said, “in Wiley Ford.”
That night she was up late again, not driving or working on the Corvette this time, but making a few notes, deciding what she would say tomorrow. Near midnight, without any planning or thought, she dialed the number for Max’s cell phone. His voice, when he answered, echoed hollow and cavernous, and she knew from the sound exactly where he was.
“I hear they’re gonna blow up that hotel tomorrow,” she said. “You’ll have to find a new ballroom to sleep in.” She sat on her bed, her feet curled under her. Outside, voices and laughter sounded, men with lanterns fishing off the docks. They would be there all night.
“Just making sure nobody gets any ideas about any early fireworks shows,” he said. She heard him light a cigarette and blow out the smoke. “I’m sorry I didn’t get back there when—”
“Or call.”
“Or call. My RDX didn’t come in until today, and without that, I could blow the whole building and leave the steel frame behind.”
“Well, everyone knows how important RDX is.”
“Hey, I said I was sorry.” She heard his footsteps as he moved around the big wooden floor.
“Speaking of sorry, that article was in the paper yesterday. Your father has been outed, and you got to corroborate. Congratulations.”
She heard him puff, then blow the smoke out. “How’s the old man taking it?” He didn’t laugh or hoot, the way she thought he would. Maybe somehow the years of this felt as sad to him as they did to her.
“The old man is taking it disappointingly well, I’m sorry to tell you.”
“I’m not a monster, Alison. I just wanted the truth out, I didn’t want to gloat.”
“You wanted to gloat plenty before it happened. Now that it has, you feel like crap.”
His footsteps stopped, and she heard him tapping something. “Don’t tell me how I feel, okay?”
She shifted on the bed, her face warming. Two days before, he’d been in this bed, and she had traced his tattoo with her fingertip. “You’re right. That’s how Í feel. I got mixed up.”
“How can you feel bad about tell—”
“Please don’t mention ‘the truth’ again, okay? You keep confusing truth with facts.”
He was silent for a few moments. Someone in the woods on the other side of the lake circled it with a flashlight in hand, whipping it out across the water and into the tops of the trees. She imagined for a minute it was Winston Ackerman, like all those old campfire ghost stories about the train watchmen using their lanterns to search for their heads. Only Winston had kept his head, as far as the story went. Maybe he was looking for his plate of beans or his cat. Maybe he was looking for a way back to his flooded house, or maybe he was looking for some children’s children of Colaville, dislodged by the flooding, someone who had heard of him, who would tell his story as though he’d been brave and noble, not stupid and suicidal.
“You won’t be here tomorrow, will you?” Max asked, breaking her thoughts.
She shook her head, though of course he couldn’t see her. “I don’t think so, Max.” She didn’t mention the memorial service. Outside, the flashlight beam was gone, replaced by more voices and laughter.
Max sighed into the phone. “You know, ballrooms are not much fun without a dance partner.”
“I know.”
He was quiet a moment. “You know, it’s good that my father got called on some of his bullshit, finally. I wish you could see that. I just wish you could see it from my side of things.”
“Yeah, I wish I could, too,” she said.
“So, you really won’t be here, even though you said you would.”
Alison closed her eyes. It was a mistake, calling him. “Listen,” she said. “Be safe tomorrow. Stay downwind. Don’t frighten the lieutenant governor. And make sure Tom is safe, too, okay?”
“I haven’t seen Tom in about four days, but I’ll do my best …. Listen, Alison—”
But she didn’t want to listen, not anymore. “Just light the fuse, Yosemite Sam,” she said, before hanging up, “and run like hell.”
Saturday morning, Alison was up before everyone else, sitting on the front porch with a blanket around her, eating a banana for breakfast and watching the lake. The day felt new the way the lake felt new—the same old water, the same old aboveground shuffle, but somehow whatever was emptied had the slow and steady power to refill itself. Some man she’d never seen before paddled a plastic kayak across the lake, leaving a ripple behind, like a water strider. His paddle dripped, the water flashed, and he seemed peaceful enough in his ignorance of the town below, all that hurt and commerce and life and death that had once been the steady rhythm of Colaville, whose big knobby bridge was no longer even visible above the surface. The man finished his paddle, climbed a dock on the opposite side of the lake, and disappeared into one of the houses, carrying his kayak. Alison stood, stretched, left the blanket on the rail and walked to her garage, sat in the driver’s seat. With her hands on the wheel, she thought about the first day with the car, and how she imagined driving it off, like John Wayne, into the sunset. The idea made her smile at herself now. The problem with horizons was that they were always on the horizon; you could never get there if you tried. She turned the key, listened to a few bars of Styx (which was getting old, but eight-track tapes weren’t exactly abundant anymore), then started the car. The gas tank was nearly empty. She rolled out into the driveway and sat idling.
In a couple of weeks, it would be October, and the days would start to diminish, and the surface of the lake would fill with fallen leaves, slowly sinking. Then the collective paranoia of Halloween, so bad that trick-or-treat was all but a thing of the past, then Thanksgiving, her favorite—-just the right size for a holiday—and then the mall orgy of Christmas, visiting Baltimore with Sarah and Bill, Marty’s absence almost a presence on such occasions. Years went past in Hallmark cards, a Stonehenge of holidays and deadlines tracking the planets, and none of it mattered. Everything lasted, and nothing did. She might have rebuilt her Corvette down to the last washer and wire, and five seconds after she turned the final bolt, something, somewhere, would start rusting again, undoing itself. Even before she turned that last bolt, even now, the present always with one foot in the past, the new always becoming the ruined. Restoration was just a lie, the very best one we have. She turned the key and shut the car down.
The first to arrive, for probably the first time in his life, was Mr. Kesler. He’d traded his jumpsuit for gray slacks, a dark plaid vest, a red necktie, and his porkpie hat. He took off on a walk around the lake while Sarah, still sleepy, helped Alison make lemonade, enough for forty or so, squeezing lemons until their forearms ached and Sarah said the smell was making her sick. Bill had brought home a meat and vegetable tray from Food Lion. The others were late to arrive; she’d put out the word to be there around noon, but most started pulling up, filling the edges of the drive, at almost one o’clock. The van arrived from Seven Springs, Mr. Harmon at the wheel this time, Mrs. Harmon riding shotgun, the two of them in matching WORLD’S GREATEST GRANDMA and WORLD’S GREATEST GRANDPA sweatshirts. Tyra Wallace was back on oxygen but smoking anyway. Lila Montgomery was gorgeous in her Levi’s and alligator sweater, her cheeks red with the cold. Some of them had brought friends, and some people turned up that Alison didn’t know at all, though she recognized a few faces from the Red Bird. They all milled about the front porch, drinking lemonade and coffee, chatting with Bill and Sarah, tradi
ng stories about Mr. Rossi that somehow made him more of a character than he’d been—bigger, stranger, smarter.
All of the dancers, Alison noticed, welcomed Mr. Kesler warmly when he returned from his hike, clapping him on the back, shaking his hand. Lila even hugged him; Lila, who said once that you had to let bygones be bygones because they would be anyway, no matter what you did. A little while later, Mr. Beachy arrived. He must have closed down the store to be there. He spent a long time looking at the Vette with Alison, popping the hood, peering behind the tires at her work on the brakes, nodding his approval. One of the waitresses from the Red Bird was there, her five-year-old wearing a Spider-Man T-shirt and a Santa hat, pedaling a Big Wheel across the grass. Tanner Miltenberger rode down the lake road on his clattering motorcycle, slowed, waved, and drove on. A group of men and boys descended on the Corvette, bragging about the kick-ass cars they’d once owned or the kick-ass cars they planned to own again someday. By the time cars stopped showing up, there were probably thirty or forty people there, on the porch mostly, but spilling into the yard and into the living room, having forgotten why they were there, settling into the rhythm of a party, of old friends, conversing. A few of them took turns passing around and holding Mr. Rossi’s box of ashes, though they were awkward doing so. Tyra Wallace set it on the kitchen table and announced, as she had numerous times before, that this was her wish, too, to end up as ashes, not to let anybody put her under the ground.
“I’d be afraid down there,” she said without a trace of fear in her voice. She pulled away the oxygen mask long enough to light another Virginia Slim, blowing the smoke at Mr. Rossi’s box. Alison imagined that one day Tyra would just turn into ash, without benefit of cremation, and would be happy to reside for all eternity in a glass ashtray at St. Patrick’s bingo. Mr. Rossi’s box made its way around to Lila, who gave it a quick awkward hug. After everyone had had their turn, the box sat ignored on the table in the empty kitchen. They should have gone for the urn, Alison thought. At least it had some shape to it, something to hold in your hands. But even with some shape, an urn just wasn’t a very good way to remember someone, no matter how many trout-fishing scenes or Last Supper’s were painted on it. The whole idea—a box or urn, either one—just felt tawdry somehow. Keeping a person like they were leftover potato salad from last weekend’s picnic. And at least with a burial site, you could go there, pay your visit, and go home. An urn was the visitor, a reminder of death living right in your house, a guest who never leaves. Alison stood in the kitchen alone, patting the box on its lid. Then she decided. She took it with her through the side door and into the driveway, opened the door of the Corvette, and put the brass box on the floorboard, wedging it down behind the driver’s seat. Then, with hardly a thought, she pulled the shark’s tooth from around her neck and curled it neatly atop the box lid.
Two o’clock was nearly here, and soon, Alison realized, Max would be pushing that green button and bringing down the Hotel Morgantown while all the dignitaries and a crowd considerably larger than this one looked on. She felt a little twinge, thinking about the day at the silo, when it blew and tilted and seemed to hold in the air, when she still thought you could hold something in the air. She closed her eyes a moment and wished him to be safe.
Frieda Landry drove up in her big Cadillac, parking not on the street, where everyone else had, but on the grass right in front of the house. She stepped out wearing all pink, from the fluffy feather on her wide hat down to the thickened toenails that peeked out of the ends of her sling-back shoes. She had brought with her the photographer in his safari vest, who had made Tanner Miltenberger into a space alien for one day and put him on the front page of the Press-Republican. Finally, everyone who had any designs on coming had arrived, and Alison led them all into the yard, under the pale September sun, under a cloudless sky. Bill had let the grass get too high, and it bent under their feet, almost white underneath.
Alison gathered everyone in the grass near her garage, circled around her, and then she began speaking, without notes this time. She began by telling them about how much Mr. Rossi had loved to dance, and how good he’d been at it, how he’d been something of a Renaissance man, able to speak on almost any topic, how he had shared his knowledge with local children in the elementary schools (she left out the part about the parents who thought his knowledge of whale tongues was obscene), how he’d been that rarest of people, a good man, going about his life with quiet decency.
She wished, right in the middle of speaking, that she were Ernie, that she could seem effortless, and effortlessly engaged. Instead, her words sounded exactly like what they were, a eulogy, one given by a priest who never really knew the person for whom he said the Mass, could never put a face with the name. She faltered a bit, looking around at the faces watching her, some bored, some scowling. Lila Montgomery smiled at her. Then Alison reached into the pocket of her jeans and withdrew a piece of paper, unfolded it. She had wanted them to hear some of Mr. Rossi’s own words, since hers, as she feared, sounded so feeble. Not the list—that was hers and hers alone. But among Mr. Rossi’s few effects—some books, a brass clock he’d been given at retirement, his trophies for trivia contests—had been a typed, yellowed draft of his book, Funny Facts, for which he’d never found a publisher. Alison read to them from the last lines of his introduction to the book:
Whatever knowledge you glean take from Funny Facts will become, I hope, part of your very own understanding of the world, the understanding that whatever you we find along the way is interesting in its own right. A wise man once said, “A clean white pebble is more valuable than a gold nugget, if you’ve just spent the day looking for a clean white pebble.” Well, readers, that wise man was me I, and I now offer you now the stories of one hundred and eighty clean white pebbles, each one a treasure. Carry it them in your pocket, and guard them well.
“So,” Alison said, “I hope that each of you will take whatever you hear about Arthur Rossi today, whatever stories you have to tell about him, and guard them well.”
She looked around; most of the people were looking at their feet—whether from emotion or embarrassment for her, she couldn’t tell. She was just about to ask if any of them might have a word or two to say about Mr. Rossi, when Mrs. Skidmore spoke up.
“Okay, then, we’ll all set about trading our stories on Mr. Rossi, and then tomorrow you and your boyfriend and Mrs. Pink Lady over there can come along and tell us how goddamn stupid we all are.” She stood with her arms crossed, a 7-Eleven coffee cup in her hand.
All around was silence, except for water slapping against the docks, a dog barking on the other side of the lake. Alison felt her face growing warm and her hands tensing, and if she’d ever had any inclination to start a fistfight with an old lady, it was now.
“I don’t think this is the time—”
“Why’d you do it?” Mrs. Skidmore persisted. “Answer that.”
“I shouldn’t have. I—”
“Then why did you?”
Alison closed her eyes. Sarah and Bill, just about her only allies, had gone up on the porch, Sarah having started to cry almost as soon as Alison opened her mouth to speak.
“Because that whole mess was a big lie all the way around,” Mr. Davidow said, his apron from the Red Bird still knotted around his waist. “She just laid out the truth.” Grumblings rippled through the small crowd, little waves of assent or disagreement.
“Old dumb us and our old dumb lie,” Mrs. Skidmore said. “I guess she showed us.” Steam from her coffee rose in wisps.
The sun fell behind dark clouds and the wind kicked up, the day growing colder. Alison held her breath, then let it go. Nothing was going right.
“And I say you’re fussing at the wrong person,” Mr. Davidow persisted. “You need to turn your guns on Mr. E T. Barnum over there.” He pointed at Gordon, who looked suddenly as if he were made from porcelain, hardened and white. “The Music Man,” Mr. Davidow said.
Somebody, a man Alison recognized from
the Red Bird, laughed loudly at this. “Hey,” he said, “the high school band can manage maybe seven or six trombones in the big parade.” Everyone laughed. Gordon looked as though he were about to be stoned to death. Alison pressed the heel of her hand to her forehead, feeling suddenly like she was standing in front of a surly group of freshmen. The five-year-old in the Spider-Man shirt drove his Big Wheel around and around the crowd, ringing the tiny bell on the handlebars.
“Okay, listen,” Alison said. “We are here for Mr. Rossi, and—”
“Hey, look!” someone else shouted. “It’s Bigfoot!” He waited a beat. “No, hold on a sec, that’s just Gordon Kesler in a hat.” Again everyone laughed, louder this time.
“Hear, now, Gordon,” the first man said, “you got a fancy silver race car sitting right there behind you. Wait around until the lake freezes over, and you can drop it in there, too, a set.” By now, the women, polite at first, were laughing as well.
Gordon kept trying to smile, trying to pretend to go along with the joke. He took off his hat and bounced it by the brim in his fingers, then pushed nervously at his glasses, tugged at his earlobes, which were redder even than his face.
“Yeah, go ahead, Gordon. Put the car in the lake. Say it was your uncle’s.”
“That is exactly what I had in mind,” Alison shouted. This stopped them. In fact, she’d had it in mind for days, and now here it was, right in front of her. “There’s meant to be a car in this lake,” she said, all the laughing subsided now, “so, let’s put one there.”
Gordon looked at her, wide-eyed. Sarah and Bill had moved off the porch and now stood at the edge of the circle, Bill whispering to Sarah. People in the crowd shook their heads and spoke in a tangle of murmurs, none of which made its way to Alison’s ears.
“Think about it,” she told them. “We roll the car in the lake on the day we remember Mr. Rossi. I bet you’ll never forget it. I bet you’ll never stop talking about it.” If she had expected protests at this point, she didn’t get any. It was her car and their lake. Even Sarah looked too shocked to speak, and the thought seemed to hit them all collectively—they could.